Polish border guards have passed information to the Ukrainian side that Polish farmers plan to temporarily stop blocking traffic at the checkpoint “Krakivets” until March 13, said the speaker of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine Andriy Demchenko.
“But whether it will be observed, whether before the 13th actually unblock the direction of the checkpoint “Krakovets” – we will see,” – said Demchenko on air telethon.
He pointed out that as of the morning of March 9, 2300 trucks are in queues at the border in all directions. The most difficult situation, according to Demchenko, opposite the checkpoint “Yagodin” and “Shegini”.
“In fact, there farmers do not let trucks traveling towards Poland through at all,” Demchenko noted.
Construction of the railway section Mostiska-Skniliv from the state border with Poland to Lviv will start this year, said Deputy Prime Minister for recovery – Minister of community development, territories and infrastructure Oleksandr Kubrakov.
“Construction of the first large section of the European gauge, Mostyska-Skniliv. We will connect our railroad with the European network. This is the first project, we will build it already this year together with European partners and donors,” he told at the forum “Ukraine. Year 2024” on Sunday.
In addition, this year it is planned to open several checkpoints for road transport on the border with Moldova, Romania, Hungary and Poland. The process of modernization of 23 checkpoints by the efforts of the Restoration Agency is also ongoing, Kubrakov added.
As reported, the construction of a narrow Euroway (1435 mm) on the Mostiska-Skniliv direction was planned to start back in 2020. Also in 2020, the government included this project in the list of priority investment projects until 2023. The project is estimated at $20.8 million.
Ukrzaliznytsia planned to complete work on the track construction project by the end of 2023.
Polish President Andrzej Duda said that blocking the border with Ukraine is not a decision of the Polish authorities, but of farmers, in turn the government is trying to solve the problem.
“Blocking the border is not a decision of the Polish authorities, it is just a decision made by farmers and farmers’ organizations,” Duda said on the air of the national telethon.
The Polish president hopes that the issue with farmers can be resolved through negotiations.
At the same time, Duda noted that after the Polish authorities opened grain corridors for the transit of Ukrainian grain, the amount of agricultural products transported through Poland from Ukraine increased 300 times.
The interview was recorded before February 20, when Polish striking farmers near the Medika-Szehyni checkpoint opened a cargo container with agricultural products and dumped them on the ground.
Metinvest Mining and Metallurgical Group increased its exports of steel products to Poland by about 16% year-on-year in 2023 to over 800 thousand tons from about 700 thousand tons in 2022.
According to Yulia Mezentseva, Head of Logistics at Metinvest Polska, in an interview with the leading Polish publication Puls Biznesu, the increase in cargo traffic is facilitated by the unblocking of routes, but transshipment in ports and border crossings remain bottlenecks.
It is also noted that despite the war, Metinvest is expanding its operations in the Polish market.
“2023 was slightly better for us than the previous year. There were no more congestion and queues on the Polish railway network, which contributed to an increase in transportation efficiency. Compared to the previous year, we recorded a 16% increase in tonnage. We transported a total of 1.9 million tons through Polish ports and railways, of which about 1.3 million were steel products, 378 thousand were iron ore and 237 thousand were coking coal,” Mezentseva stated.
Out of the total volume of products delivered from Ukraine to Poland, 939 thousand tons were exported to other countries through Polish ports.
“The coal needed for our steel plants in Ukraine was also transshipped in Polish ports,” the manager said.
Some of the goods brought from Ukraine to Poland were delivered by rail or truck to Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy, Slovakia, and other countries.
Mezentseva clarifies that iron ore used to dominate the structure of supplies from Ukraine, but now it is mainly steel products that are imported. According to the country’s Metallurgical Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Ukraine is the largest non-EU steel supplier to Poland.
The head of logistics at Metinvest Polska predicts that in 2024, Metinvest will at least maintain and perhaps even slightly increase the volume of supplies of some goods to the Polish market. It assumes that their structure will change, especially the volume of steel imported from Ukraine.
For their part, local producers fear that if demand in Poland starts to grow, Ukrainian steel will flood our market. Przemyslaw Sztuchkowski, president of Cognor, even suggests introducing limits on the supply of steel products from Ukraine to the EU. The idea is to allow free transit through Poland to other countries and to ensure that the volume of imports on the Polish market does not threaten the stable operation of Polish producers.
At the same time, Mezentseva states. “In 2021, 1.2 million tons of our steel products were sold directly to the Polish market, 0.7 million tons in the previous year, and 0.8 million tons in 2023. Due to the war, we have limited opportunities to grow production and supplies,” she notes.
In addition, she draws attention to the problems with the transportation of goods across the Polish-Ukrainian border and transshipment in ports, which impede supplies to our market and transit by sea.
“The Polish-Ukrainian agreement stipulates that six trains a day with steel and ore should pass through the wide gauge at the Medyka border crossing. In practice, three or four are allowed through, as the Polish border and railroad administrations give priority to other transport. Therefore, we often have to wait for a long time at the border, which increases our costs. For every hour of downtime, we have to pay CHF 1.9 per commercial wagon,” says Mezentseva.
She suggests that one of the reasons for the long queues at the border could be the recent protests by Polish carriers and farmers.
“The queue on the Ukrainian side sometimes reached 70 kilometers. In the case of delicate goods that needed to be delivered quickly to customers, we sometimes decided to change modes of transportation and transfer goods from cars to trains to avoid standing in a very long line,” says the manager.
She hopes that the suspension of the protests will facilitate uninterrupted transportation by road and rail. She emphasizes that after crossing the border, transportation through Poland is quite efficient.
“In 2022, we often had to wait on the access roads, but now PKP PLK has significantly improved the capacity of the roads leading to the ports,” says Mezentseva, adding that access to the terminals is almost hassle-free, but there are difficulties with transshipment.
“Bulk cargo, such as iron ore and coal, is transshipped much faster than steel products. Transshipment in Polish ports is four times slower than at Black Sea terminals,” Mezentseva said.
According to her, one of the reasons for this may be the lack of staff at the terminals.
The Metinvest representative also points out that Polish customs regulations do not take into account changes in the weight of bulk cargo during transit. However, they can occur, for example, due to weather conditions. Therefore, employees of transportation and transshipment companies have to spend a lot of time during inspections explaining that coal or ore may weigh a little more in rainy weather. There may also be so-called natural losses during transportation.
“Railroad rules allow a certain percentage of deterioration for different groups of goods. Customs rules, on the other hand, do not allow any losses that are subject to individual inspection by the service. For us, this means significant losses,” emphasizes Mezentseva.
Metinvest Group notes that it is interested in building long-term business relations in the Polish market.
“We are talking about challenges, but we are ready to work out solutions together with the Polish side. We want to simplify procedures and transportation,” adds the Head of Logistics at Metinvest Polska.
“Metinvest is a vertically integrated group of steel and mining companies. The group’s enterprises are located mainly in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro regions.
The main shareholders of the holding are SCM Group (71.24%) and Smart Holding (23.76%), which jointly manage it. Metinvest Holding LLC is the management company of Metinvest Group.
The Polish government has received a letter from the European Commission demanding to lift the indefinite embargo on duty-free imports of certain agricultural goods to Poland, Agriculture Minister Czeslaw Sekerski said at a press conference after meeting with representatives of the All-Polish Association of Farmers’ Unions and Agricultural Organizations on Thursday.
“There is a growing danger of a return to the grain crisis of a year ago. The European Commission is demanding that Poland lift the embargo on agricultural products from Ukraine, and farmers are concerned that Ukrainian grain will be only a transit in the new year,” cenyrolnicze.pl quoted him as saying.
The Polish publication noted that after the new year, farmers’ fears about the inflow of agri-food products from Ukraine will not disappear. Gustaw Endrejek, President of the Lublin Chamber of Agriculture, received signals that Poland resumed imports of four types of grain from Ukraine on January 1.
“We don’t know what will happen at the border, as there is contradictory information about the transportation of grain to Poland as duty-free imports,” the newspaper quoted Gustaw Endrejek as saying.
At a press conference, Minister Sekerski assured the public that the resolution on the unilateral closure of the Polish-Ukrainian border is in effect despite Brussels’ demand to resume imports.
“This embargo is indefinite. We believe we already have evidence of this, because we have received a letter from the European Commission demanding the embargo be lifted,” Sekerski explained.
As reported, on Thursday, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development of Poland on Twitter quoted Minister Sekerski as saying that he supported the strikers’ demands, which, however, should be adapted to the current legislation in Poland, including EU legislation. He noted that legal authorization of all the demands would take time. In any case, the Polish-Ukrainian border will not be opened and the embargo on imports of Ukrainian agricultural products will be indefinite.
On January 4, farmers from the organization “Podkarpackie Deceived Village” resumed protests and blockades of the Medyka-Shehynia border crossing, which were suspended on December 24, 2023. The leader of the organization, Roman Kondruv, told Polish media that the organization had not received written confirmation that its demands would be met, so the protest would continue.
The farmers started their protest on November 23 last year, and stopped it a month later. On the eve of Christmas, Polish Minister of Agriculture Czeslaw Sekerski came to Medyka and assured that the farmers’ demands would be met.
Polish farmers insist on receiving written assurances from the Polish government that their demands will be met. These include the abolition of the agricultural tax increase, easier access to soft loans to support the liquidity of their farms, a 1,000 zloty per hectare corn subsidy, and regulation of the conditions for importing food from Ukraine.
On Wednesday, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk emphasized the importance of ending the blockade, especially in the face of escalating bombing and increasingly intense Russian actions. He believes that the arguments will be better heard when Poland is not the country blocking the borders.
Ukrzaliznytsia (UZ) has announced the arrival of a batch of trucks to Poland by rail from Ukraine.
“The Ukrainian and Polish parties have agreed on all issues of transportation and customs and border procedures. The trucks will continue to their destination by road,” UZ said on its Telegram channel on Sunday.
The company emphasized that the next shipments are planned to be regular and involve more modernized platforms in transportation.
UZ reminded that it had organized a container train between Ukraine and Poland to transport trucks. It runs on the route Sknyliv (Ukraine) – Slavków (Poland). To order the transportation of a truck by a container train from Ukraine, you need to contact the Liski Transport Service Center branch of Ukrzaliznytsia JSC, and in the opposite direction – UZ Cargo Poland.
As reported, UZ sent the first container train with trucks to Poland on December 7. In this way, Ukrainian exporters tried to solve the problem of crossing the Ukrainian-Polish border, which had been blocked by Polish carriers for a month.
